CU-Boulder students designing drone to slow poaching in South Africa

Students competing in Wildlife Conservation UAV Challenge with 120 international teams

A group of University of Colorado students, in collaboration with students from around the world, are designing a new unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone, to help stop the poaching of rhinoceroses for their horns in South Africa.

The students are participating in the Wildlife Conservation UAV Challenge, an international competition among 120 teams to produce the most useful information-gathering drone for identifying poachers in Kruger National Park, where rhinoceroses and park rangers are under almost constant attack.

Jean Koster, CU aerospace engineering professor and the team's adviser, said rhino poaching is now considered "the African crisis."

In 2013, poachers killed 1,004 rhinos in South Africa, up from 668 in 2012, according to statistics provided by the country's environmental affairs ministry. In the first months of 2014, poachers have killed 37 rhinos, according to the ministry.

Sellers say that rhino horns can cure everything from a hangover to cancer — a myth — Koster said. In many countries, owning a horn or piece of horn is a status symbol, which drives up the demand, he said.

And it's big business. Three or four kilograms of rhino horn can bring in $300,000 to $400,000, Koster said.

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"This is a human catastrophe, what we are doing," he said. "We as humans do not have the right to extinguish any other species, and that is what we are doing because people think horn is a medicine. It's like a fingernail or toenail. It's the same material. Somebody brainwashed them or many people brainwashed them because they are greedy. They want to make money."

The challenge asks the teams to come up with a vehicle that is relatively inexpensive, under $3,000, and one that can be launched without the use of a runway and doesn't need much maintenance or upkeep.

Koster said he couldn't talk about the specifics of his team's drone for fear that poachers or their organizers would read about their plans and find ways around them. His team has been working with industry partners and wildlife conservation groups for research, he said.

"The goal of this is to go out and have an aerial overview of where people are, are they moving suspiciously?" he said. "Are they going to a place where they want to kill a rhino or are they after rhinos? And then (the device) will tell the rangers this is going on."

Part of the project, Koster said, is helping students learn to collaborate internationally, as so many real-world jobs now require.

His team of 20 is made up of students from CU, the University of Pretoria in South Africa, the University of Stuttgart in Germany, and the Helsinki Metropolia University of Applied Sciences in Finland.

The challenge, which many CU students are taking for class credit, is representative of projects they might see during their careers, said Laura Kruger, graduate student manager for the team.

"You can go through a lot of classes and do the homework and get good grades and not necessarily succeed when you get out in the real world," Kruger said. "Having deliverables and not letting the group down and learning how to cross some of the communication and cultural barriers of a team that's across the ocean where you can't meet everyday. Yeah, we've got all the technical knowledge that we learn in class, but we haven't gotten as much exposure to how it will really be when we get into the workforce."

It's also a unique project because of the emotional response to poaching, Koster said, which is a violent and bloody problem. On the team's Facebook page, Koster posts photos of rhinoceroses who are missing their horns, and more often, the entire top half of their heads.

Poachers also attack park rangers who are tasked with patrolling the vast 7,500-square-mile national park.

But because the problem the teams need to solve is so universally horrifying, the prospect of finding a solution is exhilarating, Kruger said.

"That's what I want to do as an engineer," she said. "Not just to be able to rehash all the problems that are out there, cut and paste different technologies together; it's really about finding a new way to do things."

Andrew Levine, a graduate student and systems engineering for the project, agreed.

"It's not just building some technology and putting it on a shelf somewhere," Levine said. "We're really trying to help solve a problem."

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